Chapter 6 - Social Conservatism and the White Underclass

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the last chapter I examined how the deserving/undeserving distinction was formally rescinded in the 1948 National Assistance Act but informally reintroduced through colour bars that moderated the national compact between state, business and labour. At this moment in British history, a short- to medium-term material benefit ensued from membership of a “white working class” constituency. But when Thatcherism destroyed the national compact, this constituency lost its institutionalized – albeit informal – advantage within Britain’s racialized division of labour. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the eugenicist concern for the residuum survived to inform social conservative thinking in the 1970s. Post-Thatcher, social conservatism influenced the re introduction into social policy of the distinction between those deserving and undeserving of welfare. Concurrently, an obsession rose with a population group who inhabited Britain’s council estates, were seemingly immune to character improvement, and were, shockingly, white.

In the first part of the chapter I return to the postwar period and the continued influence of eugenicist interventions into the urban poor. I follow the way in which concerns over parenting and the inter-generational transmission of poverty no longer addressed the “residuum” but rather “problem families”. I track these concerns as they gained momentum with the importation from the United States of notions of an “underclass” that lived through a “culture of poverty”. Such ideas were drawn upon by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher to inform the social-conservative basis of their economic revolution. In the United States the “culture of poverty” thesis betrayed a racialized subject: the African American mother and absent father. In Britain, this subject appeared as the victim of Thatcher’s deindustrialization, that is, a distinctly white underclass.

In the second part of the chapter I turn to New Labour and its incorporation of American “workfare” into British social policy, whereby welfare was once more made formally conditional upon the ability and desire of the claimant to work.